


Jerusalem

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death (not Sherlock/John), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2591492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is raising his daughter alone, and has built a plan of daycare and back-up sitters. When he takes the baby to Sherlock's one morning, and Sherlock is not home as promised, he discovers that Sherlock has a very good reason for being away.</p><p>(Please see end notes for more regarding this story and the warning, but these notes contain spoilers)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jerusalem

It’s just John and Abby now, with Mary gone, living another life, and he’s scraped together a day-care plan for his daughter that involves one licensed facility and a handful of volunteers to cover his late shifts, his early shifts and days when the child is ill.

Sherlock has volunteered, now that he’s finally free to move about London in plain sight with Moriarty imprisoned, and John’s equipped 221B with the proper accoutrement for an infant, just in case. And while he’s well aware that Baker Street isn’t anyone’s first choice for safety, he trusts Sherlock, and it’s the place he’d most like to go after work to pick up his child and inhale a breathful of the life he lived before. 

And when Abby is four months old, when Mary has been gone ten weeks, he finds himself texting Sherlock on a Thursday evening and yes, Sherlock can care for her on Friday morning until Mrs. Hudson is back from her doctor’s appointment at eleven thirty. It’s only three and a half hours – a good length of time for this first test. She’ll have a bottle and some play time and then a long nap.

But on Friday morning, when John trundles up the seventeen stairs with the nappy bag on one shoulder and the baby tucked against his chest, no one answers his calls. The flat is cold, and dark, and John knows, because he knows Sherlock so well, knows all the tells, that Sherlock left hours ago, in a hurry. A case, no doubt. What else would draw Sherlock out in the middle of the night?

John misses it. The casework. The leg work. 

John misses Sherlock.

He’d like to move back here, to the comfortable chaos of Baker Street, but he’s all Abby has now, and babies don’t keep consulting detective’s schedules.

He sighs, the familiar exasperation with Sherlock a comfortable feeling he can’t quite explain, and settles in his old chair while Abby sleeps against him. He sends off a text to Sherlock, and waits ten minutes, but when there’s still no response, he gathers up bag and baby and returns to the street just in time for a black car to pull up and stop in front of him.

The passenger side window opens and Anthea motions to the infant safety seat strapped in beside her. 

Three minutes later, John’s standing on the pavement alone and the car is sliding away. Sherlock has been detained. Anthea assures him Abby will be well cared for and someone will pick up John from the surgery at five o’clock.

He has no time to think about it further, to question his decidedly bad judgment, just time enough to grab a taxi and get to work. 

The day drags. He texts Sherlock at ten thirty, at noon, again at two. At four forty-five, he is pacing on the pavement outside the office, but the pacing doesn’t make the car come any sooner. It arrives at five o’clock precisely, and John slides in and texts Sherlock again.

If he is surprised to find himself at Sherlock’s parents’ home an hour later, he doesn’t say. There is a black SUV parked there when they arrive, and Sherlock is standing outside the house. He watches the car pull in, and takes a long drag from the cigarette in his hand, then drops it and crushes it beneath his shoe.

The car stops and John gets out, now both concerned and confused. He stops, studying Sherlock. He’s not a tenth the detective Sherlock is, but he knows Sherlock, and he would know something was off even if they weren’t inexplicably at his parents’ home on a Friday evening in the month of June.

Sherlock attempts a smile.

“Abby is inside with Mummy,” he says. “I’m sorry for not being there this morning.” He seems to struggle. “Something came up.”

“Something came up,” John repeats. He purses his mouth as he does when trying to absorb one of Sherlock’s ridiculous excuses. 

Sherlock again attempts a smile. It is forced and unnatural. 

“I let Anthea drive away with my daughter this morning and I didn’t know where she was going. And I didn’t ask.”

Sherlock may think this odd, or the antithesis of paternal concern, but he responds with a shrug. “She brought Abby here.” 

John takes a step forward. “Why here?”

“Because.” Sherlock slides another cigarette out of a pack he’s produced from his jacket pocket. He lights it and inhales, blowing out the smoke to the side. “Because Father died last night, John. Quite suddenly.”

John says nothing. He straightens his shoulders, his back. Sherlock is not looking at him. He is staring at the cigarette in his hand.

His hand is shaking.

John has been around people grieving the dead far too many times to count. He has seen their tears, witnessed their loss, been a spectator to their grief

Like John, Sherlock, too, has witnessed death many times. But Sherlock has never grieved a parent lost.

“Oh God – Sherlock.” John doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They lay at his sides, heavy weights. “I’m sorry – really sorry. They should have told me. I’d have found someone – someone else. Or called in sick. You should have texted me, or called me.”

Sherlock shakes his head, a quick jerk to the side. 

“No. It seems to be just what she needed. A welcome distraction. Mummy’s cared for her all day.”

John locks eyes with Sherlock. He’s not forty yet but he’s lost both parents already, and he recalls with abject clarity the finality of those deaths, the way they made him examine his past and question his future. How death drains you, physically and emotionally, saps your strength, ties a pallid veil over your downcast eyes.

“I’ll go check on her, then – if you’re alright out here.” He lifts his hand, extends it tentatively, and touches Sherlock’s arm. “Are you alright?”

“People die every day, John. A hundred and fifty thousand of them.”

Sherlock is comforting himself with facts, with the inevitability of death, with the knowledge that he is not the only man who today lost a father. 

“But only one of them is your father,” John says. He squeezes Sherlock’s arm where his fingers still touch it, then slips past him and into the house.

Abby is sleeping on Mummy’s shoulder, with her chubby cheeks and wisps of sandy hair. Mummy is standing in the parlour, gazing out the window at Sherlock. She looks toward John as he steps inside, and he pauses just inside the door. He sees movement in the kitchen, and Mycroft glances out at him.

“I’m so sorry – I just heard – ” He gestures awkwardly toward the door. “Sherlock just told me. I hope she hasn’t been much of a bother.”

“She’s no bother. No bother at all.” Mummy’s hand rests on Abby’s back. John knows the warm, comforting weight of the baby, has held her himself just like this many times, rocked her in his arms to chase the blues away. 

“Help me with tea, John.”

John knows Mycroft doesn’t need help with the tea, but he gives Mummy the best smile he can muster and ducks into the kitchen after Mycroft.

Mycroft fills him in even as he studies his mobile, frowning at something he is reading. “He got up to use the loo in the middle of the night and never came back to bed,” Mycroft says as John puts the kettle on to boil. “She found him dead on the floor.”

“I’m very sorry.” John turns toward Mycroft, finding it particularly odd to offer condolences to Mycroft Holmes. “I’m sure it was quick and painless. He won’t have suffered.”

“Will you stay through Sunday?” Mycroft puts down his mobile and turns to the laptop open on the table. He is looking at something on the screen, not at John. “I’ll send for your clothing and other things. The child has been a welcome distraction for Mummy today. I expect tomorrow will be just as difficult. She’ll be waking up alone in bed in the morning.”

_And every day after that._

John is accustomed now to waking up alone in bed, now that Mary is gone – melted into the night when Moriarty pointed his finger at her, when Sherlock came to warn them, fulfilling his last vow.

Perhaps he’d expected John and Abby to flee with her.

John frowns. Mycroft’s request is unexpected, though not out of the question. It’s Friday. He’s got the weekend off. “Alright. We can stay through. I’ll make a list – ”

“Please,” Mycroft says, pushing a pad of paper and pen toward him. “Services are set for Sunday afternoon. I’ll have someone fetch what you need.”

***

Sherlock smells of cigarettes and tea and the roses blooming along the walk where he was smoking. He lifts Abby from John’s arms without asking leave and carries her off into the kitchen.

“He’s been doing that all day,” Mummy says as John stares after him, open-mouthed. “Really, John, he gets to see her all the time. He should let me have a chance. It’s not like I’m going to get grandchildren out of either one of my boys.”

Of course, Sherlock doesn’t get to see her all the time. He’s seen her on only a handful of occasions and held her only when Mary insisted, laughing at his awkward attempts to position her in his arms. John doesn’t tell Mummy this. 

She gets up to follow Sherlock and steal the baby away from him and John slips outside to make the phone calls he knows Sherlock hasn’t made. Mrs. Hudson first, then Molly, Lestrade. Services and burial Sunday afternoon and can they please spread the word around to the others?

***

They watch telly far into the night, after John has coaxed Mummy to bed and Abby has been tucked into the portable cot from Baker Street. It’s been decided – by Mycroft, no doubt – that Sherlock will stay here these first two nights and then they’ll reassess and see what is needed.

What Sherlock needs is cigarettes, and perhaps a case to solve. The nicotine patches John included on his list give him nothing to do with his empty hands. He collapses in on himself in the corner of the sofa, and stares at the television, then at his mobile, then back at the telly again.

“No word from Mary?” he says quietly when John thinks he must be sleeping he’s been still so long.

John glances at him, shakes his head.

“Don’t expect….”

“I don’t.”

They sit in silence for the space of another hour as the telly blares on. 

“You could find her.”

What Sherlock is saying is that _he_ could find her. Find her for John. 

The baby fidgets, makes a few tentative noises, then settles back to sleep. John listens, head turned toward the dark corridor, and they both instinctively hold their breath while the silence lengthens.

“I could have gone with her, Sherlock. I didn’t.”

Eventually, John stands up.

“I’m sorry about your dad, Sherlock. I liked him – quite a lot. What made such an impression on me was how much he loved your mother.”

Sherlock stares at the telly, knees drawn up to his chest. 

“He adored her,” he said, as if pulling out the words with difficulty. “He was devoted to her. It’s a good thing he went first – he would have followed her to hell and back again.”

John considers this. He knows he can’t say the same about Mary. He let his own wife disappear into the fabric of the underworld to save her skin and never even considered going with her.

“Get some sleep, Sherlock.”

He lets his hand fall on Sherlock’s shoulder, moves it to the tight knots behind his neck, and squeezes gently, one time. Sherlock drops his head forward, but John backs away, and leaves the room.

***

There is, blessedly, only a two-hour window for friends and family to visit before the service and burial.

John knows Sherlock can hardly bear this, and could certainly not endure more.

The Holmes brothers are behaving. They are shaking proffered hands, accepting condolences, one on each side of their mother, who is holding her own and holding together. It’s a three-patch day for Sherlock, but John thinks occasions like these are a drug unto themselves for Mycroft.

Sherlock seems genuinely confused whenever the hand he shakes belongs to someone who is there for him. John can see it in his eyes – the look, the question. _Why are you here? You didn’t know my father._

Molly, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade. Billy Wiggins. Angelo. A couple others on Lestrade’s team. An odd assortment of people Sherlock has helped, here to pay their respects to the man who, despite his long relationship with death and corpses, despite having a tombstone with his name on it in a churchyard in London, has no real grasp of the social constructs of mourning.

John stands outside once the initial press of people has passed, and Mrs. Hudson and Molly and Lestrade soon join him. 

He is worried about Sherlock. Sherlock is behaving too well. He has not argued with Mycroft, and has been attentive to his mother, and the two have reached a sort of peaceful accord with the baby. Yesterday, John came in from a walk to find them both on the sofa, wedged together in the center, Abby sleeping across their laps. 

And last evening, when Mycroft arrived with take-away for dinner, and they began an awkward kind of reminiscing about their father, Sherlock seemed adrift and went outside to smoke.

Sherlock wasn’t demonstratively close to his father that John could see, but John doesn’t have a window into Sherlock’s childhood. 

No matter. John wasn’t terribly close to his own dad. But –

It will hit him, John thinks. 

But Sherlock is like no other human soul he knows, and he isn’t quite sure when that will be and what grief will look like on Sherlock if it does indeed surface.

They go in a procession of dark cars to the church for services, and John, no longer caring that he is constantly taken for Sherlock’s partner, slides into the church bench beside Sherlock, who is beside Mycroft, who is beside Mummy.

Sherlock is wearing a necktie. It doesn’t suit him. It looks like something Mycroft picked out, maroon, half Windsor knot, meticulously tied. John thinks the tie is choking Sherlock, reminding him to be something, someone, he is not.

There is music, a small choir. There are more people in this church than it can hold comfortably. It is getting stuffy by the time the minister begins. It is obvious the minister knew Sherlock’s father, and while this comforts John to some degree, it seems to have the opposite effect on Sherlock. His right hand clutches at his leg, his thigh, fingers boring in with a pressure that threatens to put holes in his trousers. 

John watches Sherlock’s hand, watches it work and worry the muscle of his thigh, watches the tension building there bleed outward to his back, his shoulders.

John sees his own hand come to rest atop Sherlock’s, sees it as if observing an act of comfort in a television movie. It doesn’t feel like a part of him as it lays there, but he moves closer to Sherlock, an inch, two, until the space between them is no space at all. 

At first, Sherlock tenses more. John sees how he stares at their hands, puzzling it out. John’s given Sherlock a case in the middle of his father’s funeral, a distraction, something to solve. His fingers begin to relax, and John squeezes them lightly. Just enough to show him he’s here, that this day will soon be over, that John will _still_ be here.

The minister talks. The choir sings. The air is stuffy, still. 

John’s hand remains atop Sherlock’s. Sherlock’s fingers relax.

They breathe in, and out, and in again. 

The minister stops speaking, the choir stands and sings.

 _Jerusalem_. 

John stiffens. Presses his lips together. Releases a breath slowly. He last heard the hymn at his mother’s funeral. He is neither terribly patriotic nor religious, but it brings his mother clearly to mind, her smile, her tired eyes.

Beside him, Sherlock stiffens too, and then he turns his hand over, slowly, deliberately, and entwines their fingers together.

The song fades and the church is quiet but still their hands remain, clasped together, on Sherlock’s leg.

***

He stays one more night, one more day.

He sleeps more lightly now that he is the sole caregiver to a four-month old child, and he opens his eyes at once when the empty space in bed beside him is suddenly filled, and Sherlock’s fingers once again close over and around his hand, weaving in with his own.

John remembers falling asleep in the spare bedroom at his mother’s house the night they’d buried his father. He remembers the cold sheets, the old house settling and creaking in the wind. He remembers lying awake, his heart beating hollow in his chest. Most of all, he remembers the absence of his father, the empty chair, the unfilled boots, the dog looking hopefully at the door whenever it began to open. The house that never again felt quite the same.

He squeezes Sherlock’s hand.

“Need something to sleep?” he quietly asks.

There is a long pause. “You, it seems,” Sherlock answers. 

And it is the most natural thing in the world for John to pull Sherlock closer, for Sherlock to mold his long body against him. To close his eyes and fall back asleep.

To wake in the early light, entwined with each other, in a warm bed, in a morning filled with possibility.

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler Summary: Sherlock's father had died suddenly, and John goes to the Holmes' residence with the baby to stay with them for the days leading up to the funeral. This is a pre-slash story about how Sherlock deals with the death, but told from John's POV and ultimately is John's story.


End file.
